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What Barreda left behind, relatives said, are cinder blocks for a new wall that will not be built and cement for a new floor that will not be finished.

"His life was always trying to do better, always trying to work harder," said 78-year-old Ranulfo Barreda, Raymundo's father. "We knew it was dangerous, but we never expected this."

Most of those who died in the Sonoran Desert came from this region of lush, rolling hills in central Veracruz, a state on Mexico's Gulf Coast.

The area is one of the country's richest agricultural zones, a land abundant with dark green coffee trees, as well as lime and orange groves and squat banana palms. But these natural riches are not enough to pull the people out of their crushing poverty.

For the last few years, the region has been shaken by global economic trends that, among other things, have caused the price of coffee to plummet.

Now, friends and relatives of the dead men said, it's not even worth the effort of the farmers here to pick the red coffee beans from the trees.

There are few well-paying jobs in neighboring towns.

"The men are forced to migrate just to sustain their families," said Ramiro Barradas, the mayor of Atzalan, the nearby county seat. "The rural economy for many years has been bad. Now it's less than zero."

Most here do not see the entire global economic puzzle, but they know some of its pieces very well.

Though no economist, Ranulfo Barreda recalls that times were much better in the late 1980s before the Mexican government stopped subsidizing coffee prices, part of a campaign to modernize the country's agricultural sector.

Now, Barreda and other farmers say, a pound of coffee beans brings just 7 cents, less than the cost to produce and pick it.

The people here know few details about Mexican President Vicente Fox's hopes for a new U.S. guest workers' program for Mexico's migrants, but they realize that it has become much more dangerous to cross the Mexican border illegally into the United States.

Still, they can make more money working three months at a construction site in Texas or a tobacco farm in North Carolina than they can in three years of tilling the rich, black soil of Veracruz.

So, those with enough ambition and daring make the crossing.

Although authorities here are waiting for official confirmation, they believe that 54-year-old Raymundo Barreda, his son, also named Raymundo, and four other men from a small cluster of villages near Atzalan died in the desert.

The bodies are expected to be returned from Arizona later this week. Another four or five local men survived and are recovering in a U.S. hospital.

The men's destinations were as varied as the individuals themselves. Some were headed to the factories of the Midwest, others to fields in California or Florida. Families said the men could make as much in an hour cutting lawns in Texas as they could in a day at the factories or offices of nearby Jalapa or Veracruz City.

Relatives and friends said the men shared a desire for a better life -- for a house or a grand wedding that only those who took the gamble and went north seemed to be able to afford.

Jose Antonio Bautista said his 17-year-old son, Nahum, who survived last week's ordeal in the desert, hoped to save enough to buy a house here.

But even before setting out on their journey, the men's sacrifices were enormous. Nahum Bautista, for instance, scraped together nearly $1,500, a princely sum here, to pay the guide who took him into the desert.

Another member of the group, Enrique Landero, 31, who died in the desert, left because he couldn't earn enough growing coffee on his two-acre plot to support his wife and 7-year-old son, relatives said.

Landero's brother-in-law believes he may have used the deed on his land as collateral for a loan to pay the "coyote," as the migrant smugglers are known here, leaving his wife and son with no savings.

"We just keep asking ourselves how this happened," said Clara Fabian, 37, Landero's sister-in-law. "All he was trying to do was improve his life."

In two previous stints working in the United States, the elder Raymundo Barreda had brought back enough cash to buy a used pickup and lay concrete on half the floor in the family's neatly whitewashed home, his father said.

The cinder-block house, even though unfinished, looks like a castle next to the wooden shacks of his neighbors. Inside, a new stereo, VCR and television are stacked on a table next to a new refrigerator.

"Around here, they say that you live like a king" if you go to the United States, said Barradas, the mayor.

But as the U.S. Congress has boosted budgets and demanded tougher immigration enforcement along the country's border with Mexico over the past decade, migrants like Landero and Barreda have been forced to take greater risks.

Death tolls for those crossing the border have increased drastically in the last several years, many dying from dehydration or exposure.

In some ways, the tougher measures have worked. The elder Barreda's brother, German, said that while he made the crossing last year, he was too scared to do it again.

The trip by foot from Sonorita, in Sonora state, to Arizona took three days, German Barreda said, traveling by night and hiding in ravines during the day.

He took along about 1 1/2 gallons of water, all he could carry. During the crossing, he said, the group left behind two men who were too weak to keep up. Luckily, they were rescued by another group of migrants crossing through the same area.

"The coyotes come here, and they promise they'll take you to a better life," said Fabian, Landero's sister-in-law. "But it is not true."

As the families here grieved, local officials criticized the government policies that they say have gutted the rural economy, giving farmers little choice but to go north a few months a year.

While Fox has vowed to secure new investment for the countryside, Barradas said that a local project to develop tourism in the region has received no help from the Fox administration.

And while the county seat has three factories where clothes are made for the Mexican market, "they don't pay enough to live," said Walter Pazos, a councilman in Atzalan. "They pay about 500 pesos (about $55) a week for 14-, 15-hour days."

Still, Antonio Bautista, the father of one of the survivors, said he no longer believes it is worth the risk to go north, looking for a better life in the United States.

"You stay here, and you're poor," he said. "But at least you survive."